Many customers desire to order items or goods remotely, e.g., on-line, through the Internet, or using a specially designed application or app on a mobile device, such as a tablet or cell phone. The customer may desire that the goods in the order be delivered to their home or that the goods in the order be assembled and ready for the customer to pick-up at a specific location, e.g., a particular store, typically at a specific time.
However, if the customer desires to pick-up the order at a particular store, when the customer arrives there may be other customers that have arrived before their arrival. Or the customer may have arrived at a time different than specified or requested. In order to make the process of obtaining the order (for all customers) proceed efficiently, it is desirable to be able to identify or establish that the customer has arrived, so that the final steps in assembling their order and delivering the order to the customer may be completed.
Typically, this requires one or more manual steps to be performed by the customer. For example, the store may have a keypad or other input device that the customer must access, e.g., by inputting an identification number or an order number to inform the store that they have arrived. However, this may create a bottleneck in the parking lot of the store and is generally inefficient.
The present invention is aimed at one or more of the problems identified above.